Been a web development company, my company need to setup a local server that allow developers to work on centralized server for ease of use and development. For this we got one Physical server. Our requirements are simple, we need IIS 7 to let the development on ASP.NET take place and we need Apache to have support for .htaccess files. Though we can do URL rewrite and more other things with IIS 7 but some of our clients have Linux hosting only, so we have to technology that our clients use.

Now I have two options, I create a Virtual Machine one over other, where one machine is Linux and other is Windows. My company got Windows 2008 Web edition License through Microsoft WebSpark program. So I decide to without Virtual machine, as I don’t like virtual machine for development purpose, they are just too much overhead. So what I did is, I install windows 2008 as Operating system, with IIS 7. Install the Web Platform using Microsoft Web Platform, which also installed ASP.NET 2.0 and ASP.NET 4.0 and SQL Server which is good enough for small scale development.

Now, it is time to configure server for PHP team, well quite a simple stuff, I download the MySQL Community edition and install it. Easy and neat. Now Download the Apache HTTPD server and install it. However I just change it’s Listen Port from 80 to 700 [just any random port] and we are done. Web Installer already install and configure PHP on IIS 7, and I use PHP-cgi from its folder to run as Apache CGI application. Hope that is decently good platform until we get our second server for development.

Our server is now become a host for:

IIS 7

Apache HTTPD server

MySQL

SQL Server

Visual SVN

Yeah it does all those, and you will get surprised to know that it runs on regular PC configuration with core2duo 2.0 GHz on intel Desktop board without RAID. It servers 1 SQL server per second per stats and have more than 20 GB of data as Web application scripts with more than 100 website configured to run on this server. And Mind it the server runs 24×7 and used only 9 hrs of production, rest of other time it just serve for Demo to client.

Isn’t it that nice little server.